Travel Alert: It's Safer Abroad

Latin America is diverse, though, and in today’s Southern Cone, political violence is almost unheard of, even if intemperate language between (and even within) opposing political factions is often the rule rather than the exception. It doesn’t help, though, when locals themselves, spurred by sensationalist coverage of gruesome but atypical crimes, exaggerate the issue of “insecurity” even if, statistically speaking, their chances of being a victim are miniscule.



Every city and country, of course, has bad neighborhoods, such as Buenos Aires’s so-called Fuerte Apache (actually just outside the city limits). Still, foreign visitors are unlikely to even see those neighborhoods except at a distance - they’ll be visiting tourist-friendly barrios such as Palermo, Recoleta and San Telmo instead. In remote areas such as Patagonia, serious crime is nearly non-existent.

As Steves implies, though, Southern Cone inhabitants might have more to worry about in visiting the United States. If 35-year-old Adolfo Ignacio Celedón of Santiago (his hometown's placid Parque Metropolitano is pictured above) had not traveled to this country, he would not have been shot to death by yet unknown assailants last September 18th in Berkeley, California - only a couple miles from my own home in Oakland - in the presence of his American fiancée. In the aftermath, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Henry K. Lee found himself inundated with requests from the Chilean media for information about the senseless killing, and the story made the front page in the Santiago daily La Nación.

One commentator on the article recalled another instance in which a “hateful racist” killed two vacationing Chileans and wounded three others in Florida in 2009. Another reader, charitably enough, countered that “assaults, robberies and other crimes take place everywhere, in every country.” Still, this provides some perspective on the often mistaken notion that staying home is safer than traveling.

Source:
Europe Travel